


The Graveyard Reader

by fawsley



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:33:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawsley/pseuds/fawsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finds a coping mechanism after Sherlock dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Graveyard Reader

His dentist was running late, as always.

John sympathized of course, understanding far too well about appointments that overran. Though he couldn’t actually remember an occasion when Mr Benison had seen him at the appointed time. If you were punctual you always had to wait; if you were late you got a stern telling-off from the receptionist and shoved to the back of the queue, so you still had to wait anyway, and make as best use you could of the pile of ancient magazines stacked on the rickety table in the centre of the cramped and dingy waiting room.

Which was where he first read the story.

A random selection from the pile, a journal that had long since lost its cover, some ongoing series on classic tales. He’d got to the end by the time his name was called and was mulling it over to himself.

Totally implausible of course, but the writing was excellent and the idea… Well, it was an interesting one if nothing else.

John hated injections and insisted on putting up with the pain when Mr Benison started rummaging around in his back molar. He went over the story again in his imagination to take his mind off the discomfort. 

Cavity filled and bank account depleted, he detoured back into the waiting room on his way out and shoved the anonymous magazine into the deep poacher’s pocket of his jacket.

***

Totally implausible of course, but if he was going to send himself mad by forever revisiting Sherlock’s grave, he might as well spend the time indulging in something so illogical that Sherlock would have shot it down with his acerbic arsenal before John had got half way through thinking about possibly explaining what he was up to.

Mind you, in a way it wasn’t a million miles away from Sherlock when you thought about it. Observing rather than seeing. How had the writer described it? John pulled out the tattered pages and read the words yet again.

_There’s nothing to deduce, or to guess at. It’s all there to be read._

John leaned against the edge of Sherlock’s gravestone and skimmed the text for clues once more.

_Surely you’ve had the feeling that a human being is too much, has too much, means too much just to go out like a light, or be eroded away like the soil of a dust bowl. ___

‘You were certainly that, Sherlock. Too much of everything. Too much not to leave a trace.’  


Attempting to discover a methodology for madness from a work of fiction. Perhaps he was mad already. So what did it matter?

***

_What you're trying to tell me is that a person who can read graves can stand in front of one and read it like a book … And get out of it everything that person ever did._

_Or said, or thought._

_Even things nobody ever knew before?_

_Especially those things._

‘I began to be able to read you Sherlock. Are you going to let me finish now?’

John didn’t ask himself whether or not he really wanted an answer.

*** 

_What do you read?_

_The curve of the mound, the encroachment of growth on it – grass, weeds, mosses. The kind of vegetation that grows there, and the shape of each stem and leaf, even the veining in them. The flight of insects over it, the shadows they cast, the contours of rain-rivulets as they form, as they fill, as they dry._

Forget the shooting it down, it really was the sort of absurd game that Sherlock would have loved. 

***

Like the anonymous protagonist of the story, John went back every day. But he didn’t have a teacher, had to teach himself. 

In the story it took nearly a year to learn the vocabulary, the grammar, the semantics, beginning with the easy-reader of a child’s grave. 

John was starting out with Dostoevsky.

_Living things aren’t finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known – these things are still at work in them; nothing’s finished._

‘Don’t ever be finished, Sherlock.’

***

_I learned the meaning of the curl of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten._

***

The final time John read the story the pages could no longer hold out, disintegrating in his hands in the sudden autumn squall. 

But it didn’t matter any more, because he knew the ending.

Knew the ending of the story and the ending of his two-year madness in a graveyard. 

He could read graves now, had taught himself a skill that might not actually exist, but somehow he had made it come alive. 

And now he knew the story told by the smooth, shiny headstone, by the lack of growth on the grave, by the way the rain and dead leaves refused to linger, by the strange tangles Mrs Hudson’s regular posies rotted into.  


John folded his collar against the wind, smiling to himself as he turned from the grave for the last time and walked smartly away back into real life. 

The grave had no tale to tell at all.

**Author's Note:**

> The short story John reads is _The Graveyard Reader_ by Theodore Sturgeon which I first read aged 9 and which has haunted me ever since. I can't find a link to an online version but it's certainly worth hunting out.


End file.
